Remarks at the dinner celebrating the centennial of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: January 29, 2010.

• Author: Drizin, Steven A.
• Position: Centennial Symposium: A Century of Criminal Justice

Good evening. It is my honor and pleasure to talk with you about the history of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at this celebration of its one-hundredth birthday. Trying to distill the history of the Journal into a fifteen or twenty minute dinner-time speech is impossible. After all, there have been 471 issues of the Journal to date, totaling 88,567 pages. Fortunately, when I started to look into the Journal's history, my mind on these matters was not a complete blank slate. I had done some historical research once before, in the fall of 1985, twenty-four years ago when I was the Editor-in-Chief. Let me take you back to that time for a minute.

When the reins of the JCLC were turned over to me and my editors, the Journal was in bad shape. The previous editors had published only one of their four issues, meaning that if we were to get the Journal back on track, we had to publish a record seven issues in a single year. Angry authors were calling the Journal offices wondering when their articles were going to appear. Believe me when I tell you that hell hath no fury like the tenure-track professor. One such author had even hired a lawyer and threatened to sue the JCLC because he felt that a student comment had borrowed a bit too liberally from his work without proper attribution.

But by far the biggest crisis was the threat of extinction. Dean Bennett, in a cost-cutting measure, had proposed to eliminate the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology and the Journal of International Law and Business, wondering why the law school needed any journals other than the Law Review. In the early days of the Journal, Dean Wigmore had saved the Journal when the University pulled the plug on its funding in 1921. In the 1985 crisis, two men came to my rescue--Fred Inbau and James Haddad. Professor Inbau, whom I will speak of shortly, was an Emeritus Professor at the time. I only spoke to him once in my life but recall his willingness to do anything in his power to keep the Journal going. Professor Haddad, on the other hand, was the Faculty Advisor, and he and I met frequently to discuss these crises. I do not know what arguments carried the day or how the issue was resolved--whether it was a by faculty vote or whether Professors Inbau and Haddad did some arm twisting--but I do recall relying to some extent on the Journal's history, the fact that it had the largest subscription of any law journal, and the fact that it was profitable in arguing to save the Journal. The bottom line is that these two men saved the Journal, and with it they saved me from the infamy of becoming the last EIC of the JCLC.

Three men stand out among all others in terms of their influence over the past one hundred years in the success of the JCLC. Those three are John Henry Wigmore, Robert Harvey Gault, and Fred Inbau. In her brilliant essay, "The Rise and Fall of the American Institute of Criminology" (which appears in Vol. 100, Issue 1), Jennifer Devroye, a 2009 Northwestern Law graduate, describes Wigmore's early and enduring contribution to the JCLC. In 1909, Wigmore, along with Clarence Darrow, Roscoe Pound, and Municipal Court Judge Harry Olson, organized the first National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology here at Northwestern on the occasion of the Law School's fiftieth anniversary. Pound later described the Conference, which spawned the JCLC, as Wigmore's "second great stroke" in criminal law and procedure, the first being his multi-volume treatise on the law of evidence.

In looking back at Dean Wigmore's contributions to the Journal, I couldn't help but notice an editorial he wrote in the third volume of the Journal, issue number five (1914). In this editorial, "The Bill to Make Compensation for Persons Erroneously Convicted of Crime," Wigmore wrote that "[t]he state is apt to be indifferent and heartless when its own wrongdoings and blunders are to be redressed" and noted that one "glaring instance of such heartlessness, not excusable on any grounds, is the state's failure to make compensation to those who have been erroneously condemned for crime." Wigmore argued that "the wrongs done by the State through erroneous conviction," although rare, cry out for compensation. Wigmore wrote that a "few cases of this kind stand in our annals as perpetual blood marks and do more to weaken the cause of law and order than a thousand unjust acquittals." He urged...